While we’ve had a blast playing against everyone after launch, and many of you had kind words about the new game mode, the day after launch we were left not-yet-satisfied with the overall feel of combat. Multiplayer hits often felt unfair, random, or surprising. At times, it felt like the best strategy was to swing blindly and pray to the server gods!

Before moving on from 1v1 duels, we wanted to improve client and server performance and responsiveness, and make melee hits feel more fair and predictable.

A few weeks in, we’ve got a fun update ready with a game feel we are thrilled with. Improving combat feel will be an ongoing effort for us, and this should be a healthy start!

Introducing the Greatsword!

Replacing the old sword in multiplayer, the greatsword is bigger and has a longer windup time.

Why the longer windup? It gives us the power to compensate for lag!

The problem: Attacks landing at different times!

“My sword passed right through them!” was a common reaction to our first version of multiplayer.

Although we used to start showing a swing right away on your computer, the server wouldn’t start its swing until after receiving your computer’s “swing now!” network event.
By the time the server tried to deal damage, your opponent might have moved out of the way!

What’s worse — when your hits did land, your opponent would often get killed before they even got a chance to see your swing start. “How did that kill me??”

The solution: Eat the lag in the windup time!

Our goal is to make sword swings land at the same exact time. Your head should appear to fly off at the exact moment you see your opponent’s sword pass through your neck.

To achieve this, we start with an alternative set of animations with a powerful windup sequence. Each strike takes note of and sends along its synced-up start time — letting the server and your opponent both skip forward to the exact right time in the swing animation when they learn about it.

The result is that both you and your opponent see the strike land at the exact same time. It’s like TIME TRAVEL FOR YOUR SWORD!

In play-testing, we’ve found it feels much better than before, and results in many more epic moments of “OH GOD THE SWORD IS GOING TO HIT ME” (and then the sword hits you).
Let us know what you think!

The Greatsword Challenge!

Since the Greatsword has a longer wind-up and thus a new timing to master, you’ll need some practice with it.
We’ve added a new Endless Challenge where every sword is a Greatsword!

Multiplayer bow now works at close range!

Multiplayer kicks feel better!

We expanded the multiplayer kick collision box and added lag compensation similar to that of the Greatsword!

Duel Invite Match Customization

You can now customize the number of starting clones and skill points for custom duel matches!

Optimizations and Various Fixes

Optimized the game to load 6 times faster and use 1/3 of the memory than before!

Made multiplayer jump pads trigger quicker.

Optimized landing in lava to no longer cause extreme lag in multiplayer.

Fixed issue where game settings could override system screen refresh rate.

Optimized server build so games start up quicker (and not cause lag on other games when starting up!)

More fun stuff coming, stay tuned!

We have some exciting plans for the next multiplayer update. 🙂

If you’re feeling extra adventurous and want to test bleeding edge versions of the game before the next update, follow our development on Twitch and watch for opportunities to try out what we’re building next, live!

Next Update: Improving Lag & Performance!

While many players are enjoying multiplayer, there are a few things we want to do to get pings lower and make the combat feel much more responsive. We’re going to be doing a mini-update next, with:

(Soft) Ping-based region-locking for matchmaking — right now you’ll create matches in your closest region, but might end up joining a far away one if someone else is waiting. We’ll add some smart logic around how we handle that.

Lag compensation for sword / hammer / arrow hits. This will help hits feel more fair!

Optimization so new games starting up doesn’t cause other games on the server to chunk for a few seconds (you might notice your game freezes a bit — this should fix that!)

This was a BIG update (including an overhaul of so much of the single-player tech as well) — so let us know if you come across any new bugs or have issues with the game!

HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who tested the multiplayer beta over the last three months, who is hanging out playing duels this launch weekend, and for generally making this crazy dream of multiplayer Clone Drone a possibility for us!

Once 1v1 is feeling great, we’ve got some fun new plans for multiplayer on deck 🙂

What’s Done!

The Duel Match Structure

We’re zeroing in on a final, fun match structure for duels. Each player starts the match with 3 lives, and after deaths, players get to pick an upgrade!

Picking upgrades after death adds another layer of strategy to the game, letting you react to your opponent’s choices and the map you’re on!

Multiplayer-ifying Upgrades, Weapons, and Hazards!

As part of making the game work for multiplayer, we’ve been converting everything over to be multiplayer-compatible, including nearly every upgrade (hammer, bow, jetpack, kick) and hazards (sawblades, spikes, moving platforms over dangerous lava). While you may have kicked a Sword 1 robot or two into sawblades before, we’re finding it’s a totally fresh experience sending real human-controlled robots to their doom. Practice your maniacal laugh, you’ll need it.

Dedicated Servers!

When we built Long Live Santa! as a test game, we used a direct peer-to-peer connection for matches. While this worked okay (and cost a good bit less) — players who were acting as the host would sometimes drop, some hosts would have inconsistent internet connections or high pings to others in matches, and in some cases use their position as server host as an unfair advantage!

For Clone Drone’s multiplayer, we’re pulling out all the stops and hosting our own full-on auto-scaling dedicated servers! While the development branch is currently targeting a single region (US-East), soon we will support servers in regions worldwide, so not only should gameplay be nice & fair, but hopefully pings will be buttery-low!

What’s Left to Do!

While we’d love to launch right now, we’ve got some things to do before shipping multiplayer to everyone!

Add some awesome multiplayer arena levels! While we have a few early level ideas, there’s a lot of potential for fun new combat levels. Some will even take place outside of the classic arena!

Make all of single player work again! In the process of multiplayer-ifying everything, there are some things in single-player that need a bit of updating to work right again. On the bright side, this will make adding co-op much quicker once we get to that 🙂

Stability, anti-cheat security, performance, etc! We want to make this release as solid as possible, and lots of things have changed!

The up-shot of all this is — once we’ve developed this core fighting experience, other game modes will become easier and quicker to add! We’re super excited about what’s next for multiplayer (and shared some of our ideas in this other post), and can’t wait to start slicing you all in half with our laser swords.

Just over three weeks ago, we announced we’ll be tackling adding multiplayer to Clone Drone in the Danger Zone—and to learn the principles of multiplayer game development, we’d first create a simple test game.

Instead of throwing the prototype away, we decided to quickly publish it for free on Steam!

Less than a month after starting development, and just a couple days after launch, Long Live Santa! has already been installed by over 40,000 players!

Early reviews claim such definitely-not-joking things as:

“10/10 better than PUBG confirmed” “Definitely better than PUBG” “PUBG has a rival”

Thanks to all the wonderful Clone Drone players who helped beta test early builds and shared ideas and encouragement on our Twitch dev-streams!!

We’re now buzzing with ideas for ways to make a fantastic Clone Drone multiplayer experience, and we’re glad we took the time to “burn a pancake”—though some say the pancake is not so bad!

In January we will start designing and building multiplayer integration with Clone Drone, using what we’ve learned from building the prototype to make it amazing!

Steam Winter Sale: Save 34% on Game Copies!

If you haven’t yet had a chance to pick up Clone Drone—or are kind enough to share the secret simple joys of Clone Drone with a friend for the holidays—it’s currently 34% off, its biggest Steam Store discount to date!

Now’s a great time to treat yourself, be a hero, and grab a copy or two for some holiday training!

Many of you expressed that although the Chapter 3 update was a lot of fun, it was over too quickly. This update builds on the new mechanics introduced in last update and adds a slew of new content for you to play with!

Story Mode: A new experience!

All levels in chapter 1 & 2 have been updated with new maps.
We’ve mostly kept the ideas of the existing maps, but re-built them using the level editor to up their quality.

We’ve also introduced Difficulty Settings!

If you’ve found Story Mode too easy try playing on Hard or Insane.
The only difference is in what enemies appear on the levels.

Chapter 3 also supports the new difficulty levels.

Endless Armor Challenge

Do you wish every enemy in the game HAD ARMOR??
Try the Endless Armor Challenge!

We’ve also added a bunch of armored enemies to normal Endless Mode.

Hello I am Business Jetpack Bot!

Clearly the game needs a new jetpack bot wielding a fire sword.!spawn bjetpack Kappa
Speaking of fire, we’ve made it spread faster!
The slow creeping spread didn’t feel good to get killed by. This feedback first surfaced in this forum thread. Thanks guys!

Bugs bugs bugs

We also fixed a ton of bugs. Let us know if you find more at bugs@doborog.com!

Next up: TwitchCon!

Erik and Brian will be hanging out at TwitchCon this week. Look forward to some all day streams this weekend of random people trying Twitch Mode.